Various health care environments such as hospitals or assisted care facilities can involve relatively complex information and associated work flows. Health care workers can serve in a wide variety of roles and work in many different physical locations across a hospital or other enterprise. Some workers, such as physicians, can be very mobile. As may be expected in such environments, effective communication among workers can be an essential requirement for the overall operation to be coherent and productive.
Different types of communication in a hospital or other enterprise can be measured along a spectrum of urgency. For example, urgent-type messages can often be delivered via a paging system or walkie-talkie type device. Non-urgent-type messages can be delivered via e-mail or voice mail. Other technologies such as beepers and overhead paging systems (for urgent-type messages), and laptop computers and telephones (for non-urgent-type messages) also exist. An example of an urgent-type message can include a nurse notifying a doctor of an urgent medical condition. Non-urgent-type messages can include a general notification of an upcoming scheduled maintenance, a request for replenishment of material resources, or the like.
In a health care environment, such as a hospital, there can also be many “medium urgency”-type messages. Medium urgency-type messages can require attention as soon as possible, but not immediately. Examples of medium urgency-type messages in a health care environment can include nurse-to-nurse reports posted before transferring a patient between units, non-urgent requests for information or clarification between nurses and doctors, requests for an unscheduled room cleaning, and the like.
However, for medium urgency-type messages there are relatively fewer suitable technologies. Voice mail and e-mail are oftentimes not checked by the recipient, or in some instances ignored, due to the time and effort required to check and receive the voice mail or e-mail. In addition, the recipient must “poll” for messages. That is, the recipient may not know whether any voice mail or e-mails exist until he or she actually checks. With voice mail, and typically with e-mail as well, a sender may not know whether the recipient has received the voice mail or e-mail. On the other hand, medium urgency-type messages should not result in interrupting a recipient from his or her current task, such as would happen with a page or walkie-talkie voice conversation. Telephone calls are oftentimes relatively worse, as such communications behave like a walkie-talkie conversation with a relatively longer initial delay, or may revert to a voice mail, but without the caller knowing prior to the call whether the call will result in a direct conversation with the recipient or whether a voice mail will have to be left for the recipient.
Therefore, a need exists for methods, systems, and apparatuses for providing a notification of message in a health care environment.
A further need exists for methods, systems, and apparatuses for providing a notification of a voice message in a health care environment.
Yet a further need exists for methods, systems, and apparatuses for providing message notifications associated with care of a patient in a health care environment.